Geomimicry Offers a New Framework for Engineering Sustainable Materials

When engineers look to nature for inspiration, they often turn to living systems. The flight of birds has influenced aircraft design, gecko feet inspired new adhesives and lotus leaves led to the development of self-cleaning surfaces.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania now argue that engineers should look somewhere else in nature as well: the ground beneath their feet.

In a perspective paper published in APS Journals, the team introduces geomimicry, a framework that asks how soils, sediments and other Earth-mediated materials have been shaped over geologic time, and how those processes can inspire the next generation of sustainable materials.

“Soils have been evolving locally in different places under climate, temperature cycles, rain, dryness and all of that,” says Paulo Arratia, Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Scholar and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM). “We want to learn those rules so that we can re-engineer materials.”

A Framework Years in the Making

The paper marks a milestone in a collaboration that has unfolded over nearly a decade.

Douglas Jerolmack, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in Earth and Environmental Science and Professor in MEAM, Arratia and their collaborators had been studying seemingly unrelated questions: Why do some mudslides behave like flowing sand while others behave more like hair gel? How do repeated wetting and drying cycles strengthen soil? Why does mud collected along the Delaware River give Major League baseballs exactly the right amount of grip?

Lena Blackburne’s legendary baseball rubbing mud has been a game-day staple for nearly a century, helping Major League pitchers achieve a better grip. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have scientifically confirmed its friction-enhancing properties, revealing its significance not just in baseball, but also in the broader field of materials science.

Each project uncovered a small piece of a much larger puzzle.

Rather than presenting a single experimental breakthrough, the team’s most recent paper connects years of research into a new way of thinking about Earth materials, one the team hopes will encourage researchers from soft matter physics, materials science, mechanical engineering and earth science to tackle common problems together.

Looking at Soil Like a Materials Scientist

For lead author Shravan Pradeep, a postdoctoral researcher working with Arratia and Jerolmack, geomimicry began with a different way of looking at soil.

“My background is in chemical engineering and materials science,” he says. “I started working on Earth science problems after I came to Penn.”

Rather than asking how to classify different kinds of soil, Pradeep wondered whether the same principles engineers use to design new materials could explain how natural soils acquire their remarkable properties. That perspective became one of the central ideas behind geomimicry: understanding materials by what they do rather than what they are made of.

The paper describes these as mechanical functional groups. Rather than asking whether a soil contains a particular kind of clay, geomimicry asks what that clay does. Does it help particles stick together? Allow a material to flow? Store or move water? The framework groups materials by these mechanical functions rather than by their chemical composition.

That shift helps explain why soils with different compositions can behave in surprisingly similar ways, while nearly identical soils can behave completely differently depending on where they formed.

Earth is Constantly Training Its Materials

One of the paper’s ideas is that nature doesn’t create soils, it trains them. 

Unlike manufactured materials, soils spend thousands of years responding to cycles of rain, drought, freezing, thawing, earthquakes, flowing water, plant roots and microbial activity. The researchers call this process environmental training, where fluctuating natural forces reorganize microscopic structures and gradually give rise to new material properties.

Wet-dry cycles can strengthen soils by forming tiny bridges between particles. Flowing water reorganizes riverbeds, while freeze-thaw cycles reshape pore networks. Rather than viewing those changes as random, geomimicry treats them as lessons in material design and suggests they leave behind a kind of “memory” that influences how soils respond to future stresses.

“Nature has already optimized these systems,” Pradeep says. “Can we understand the design principles that went into making them?”

Seeing Soil Differently

The researchers hope geomimicry changes how scientists think about Earth materials, and inspires how everyone else sees them in everyday life.

“When we look around on the surface of the Earth and see different materials, those materials are telling us that they’re the ones that survive in that environment,” says Jerolmack. “They’re made by that environment, and therefore they’re resilient to the stresses that environment has.” 

In other words, every patch of soil represents nature’s solution to a different environmental problem.

For Pradeep, that shift in perspective begins with one of the simplest experiences imaginable: picking up a handful of dirt.

“A trained farmer actually knows whether that soil is good or not just by feeling the texture,” he says. “When you pick up soil in your hand, thousands of years have gone into optimizing the particle sizes, the interactions between particles and the texture you’re feeling. It’s an evolved system.”

That also means no two handfuls of soil tell exactly the same story.

“The soil you pick up here is going to look different than the soil you pick up in California,” he says. “Both have evolved for their specific landscape, climate and geographical location. It’s a system that has been pruned by nature.”

The next time you work in your backyard, walk through a park or visit a community garden, geomimicry encourages a different perspective. Instead of seeing dirt as something ordinary, you might wonder what environmental story it tells, what forces shaped it and what lessons it still has to teach.

 Engineering the Next Generation of Earth-Based Materials

Looking at soils differently also opens new possibilities for engineering them.

The framework points to opportunities in climate-resilient agriculture, adaptive construction materials, erosion-resistant landscapes, sustainable manufacturing and even planetary exploration by uncovering the design principles behind Earth-mediated materials.

For Pradeep, one of the biggest motivations is the growing pressure on Earth’s soils.

As climate change, intensive agriculture and land degradation continue to reshape landscapes around the world, he hopes future researchers will begin asking different questions.

“Soil takes a long time to restore,” Pradeep says. “Nature takes thousands of years to produce soil. By understanding it as an evolved system, we should be able to create new types of soil. What are the simple rules we can use to engineer it?”

The researchers believe the answers are already beneath our feet. The challenge now is learning how to read the stories those materials tell.

This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for the Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture (IoT4Ag) and U.S. NSF Division of Materials Research.